How OHCHR Modernized Global Publishing With AWS: A Cloud-Native Drupal Transformation

Introduction

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) plays a critical role in amplifying the global conversation on human rights. To fulfill this mission, OHCHR must deliver multilingual content across regions reliably, securely, and at scale. But with an aging SharePoint CMS and fragmented publishing workflows, their digital platform was no longer fit for purpose.

That changed with a cloud-native transformation.

In partnership with Axelerant, OHCHR replatformed to a fully managed Drupal 9 ecosystem hosted on AWS. The result: global-scale publishing infrastructure with improved uptime, performance, governance, and a future-ready foundation for AI-powered multilingual content delivery.

The Challenge: Legacy CMS Meets Global Complexity

OHCHR’s existing SharePoint setup was riddled with structural and operational challenges:

• Inconsistent metadata and taxonomy models made content management across six official UN languages a logistical burden.
• Publishing workflows were fragmented, with manual handoffs, limited approval states, and no formal translation checkpoints.
• The architecture lacked global failover, resulting in reliability concerns during high-traffic periods.
• Governance, security, and auditability, crucial in a UN context, were minimal.

Operational overhead was high, delivery timelines were slow, and multilingual consistency was difficult to maintain.

Why AWS: A Strategic Cloud Foundation

Axelerant proposed a cloud-native re-architecture grounded in AWS. The decision was driven by several AWS capabilities:

• Scalability and high availability with Amazon EC2 and RDS Multi-AZ
• Security and governance through CloudTrail, AWS Config, and WAF
• Global performance via CloudFront and Route 53 latency-based routing
• Automation and consistency using Terraform and AWS-native CI/CD

This wasn’t just about hosting Drupal on the cloud, it was about building a resilient, globally accessible publishing platform from the ground up.

The Cloud-Native Architecture

Application Tier: Containerized Drupal On Amazon EC2

Drupal was containerized and deployed on Amazon EC2 instances within Auto Scaling Groups across multiple Availability Zones. This ensured fault tolerance and elastic handling of variable traffic, crucial for regional surges in content consumption.

Application load balancers (ALB) routed traffic efficiently, while sizing was informed by telemetry and adjusted using spot and scheduled instances for cost optimization.

Database Tier: Amazon RDS For Resilient Content Delivery

Transactional data was migrated to Amazon RDS MySQL Multi-AZ for high availability, automated patching, and point-in-time recovery. Read replicas handled editorial and public-facing read traffic without performance degradation.

The team fine-tuned database queries and indexes to enhance P99 latency, and learned to optimize deployment workflows around RDS backup schedules to avoid downtime.

Global Delivery: CloudFront, Route 53 & WAF

To ensure fast, secure content delivery:

• Amazon CloudFront served edge-cached assets globally.
• Route 53 provided latency-based routing across regions.
• AWS WAF offered DDoS mitigation and request-level filtering, an essential layer for public-facing UN sites.

Caching strategies were multi-tiered: Varnish for full-page caching, Redis (via ElastiCache) for object/session storage, and CloudFront for static assets, coordinated to prevent stale content delivery.

Governance & Observability: CloudTrail, AWS Config, And CloudWatch

Security, auditability, and configuration governance were critical due to OHCHR’s compliance needs. Axelerant implemented a layered observability model:

• CloudTrail: Captured all API calls and changes for auditability.
• AWS Config: Enforced configuration baselines and detected drift.
• CloudWatch: Provided real-time performance telemetry and alerting.

This trio gave OHCHR a governance blueprint: centralized logging, misconfiguration detection, and automated policy enforcement.

Infrastructure As Code: Terraform And AWS CI/CD

Axelerant codified the entire stack using Terraform, structuring reusable modules for networking, compute, storage, DNS, IAM, and caching layers. Environments (dev, stage, prod) were isolated using Terraform workspaces with environment-specific configurations.

CI/CD pipelines were implemented using AWS CodePipeline and GitOps practices, ensuring continuous delivery with rollback options. Remote state was managed via S3 and DynamoDB for secure locking.

Overcoming Migration Challenges

The engagement wasn’t without complexity. Key challenges included:

• Metadata Rationalization: SharePoint’s inconsistent taxonomy required editorial re-engineering before Drupal migration.
• Workflow Redesign: New editorial states, “ready for translation,” multilingual review, translation vendor handoffs, had to be built into the Drupal experience.
• Migration Rollback: Given the volume, repeatable ETL scripts and rollback plans were required, per contractual obligations.
• Deployment Downtime: Initial go-live faced 504 errors. Axelerant fine-tuned maintenance modes, PHP/LB timeouts, and cache behaviors for a stable rollout.

Results That Matter

The impact of the AWS-powered transformation was clear:

• 40% faster publishing cycles across six official UN languages
• 99.95% uptime with Multi-AZ and autoscaling
• 35% cost savings versus on-prem infrastructure
• Improved latency & content reach via CloudFront + Route 53
• Audit-compliant governance with centralized logging and drift detection

Perhaps most importantly, the platform is now ready to scale further, supporting future enhancements such as AI-assisted translation workflows and personalized multilingual content discovery.

Project Delivery & Collaboration

Axelerant worked closely with OHCHR stakeholders across time zones, using a RACI matrix for approvals, Confluence + Jira for asynchronous documentation.

The deployment playbook included backup recommendations (e.g., disabling auto-backups during deploys), rollback mechanisms, and multilingual UAT plans involving staged editor sign-offs and accessibility checks.

Carolina Ramirez, Digital Project Manager at OHCHR, shared:

“We are very satisfied with the implementation of the OHCHR design system, both from the back end and front end.”

Final Thoughts: Building For Global Impact

This wasn’t just a CMS migration. It was a strategic re-architecture that combined Axelerant’s engineering excellence with AWS’s robust cloud services to deliver global-scale publishing for one of the world’s most important human rights institutions.

For organizations with multilingual content at scale, mission-critical availability needs, and strict compliance requirements, this is the model to follow.